Become a member of Wrong Side of History
Get the complete End Notes at the end of each series, occasional essays and Q&As, and help support the research behind the show.
Join here
What kind of future did the eugenicists believe they were building?
Eugenics did not only promise to prevent human decline. Its supporters imagined a world without hereditary disease, a more intelligent and cooperative humanity, and eventually even world peace.
In Part Two, I follow that promise from one of the movement’s clearest early targets, haemophilia, into its increasingly ambitious visions of human betterment.
Francis Galton tried to measure inherited genius. Caleb Saleeby imagined raising the average person. William Inge proposed an ideal hierarchy of human excellence. And at the movement’s fringe, Nietzsche’s Superman became a prophecy that eugenics might fulfil.
To understand why eugenics became mainstream, we have to understand the future its supporters believed they were creating: not one of death and destruction, but health, abundance, purpose and peace.
Follow Wrong Side of History for the End Notes on September 22. The opening section will be public; members receive the complete episode.
READ THE SOURCES
Parenthood and Race Culture by Caleb Williams Saleeby:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42913/42913-h/42913-h.htm
Hereditary Genius by Francis Galton:
https://galton.org/books/hereditary-genius/
“Probability, the Foundation of Eugenics” by Francis Galton:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_71/August_1907/Probability%2C_The_Foundation_of_Eugenics
Aratra Pentelici by John Ruskin:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25897/25897-h/25897-h.htm
The Eugenics Review, Volume 1:
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000529261
SOURCE NOTES
The John Ruskin passage comes from Aratra Pentelici, a series of Oxford lectures delivered in 1870.
William Inge was Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge and later Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral.
ON THIS EPISODE
Jay Singleton: Writer and host
El Train: Music
JUMP TO:
(00:00) — Introduction and Membership
(00:42) — What Victorians Owed Future Generations
(03:50) — Haemophilia and Preventable Hereditary Suffering
(08:31) — Eugenics and the Birth of Modern Statistics
(10:19) — How Eugenicists Judged a Condition
(12:03) — From Colour Blindness to “Feeble-Mindedness”
(15:14) — The Genie Out of the Bottle
(17:01) — From Preventing Suffering to Improving Humanity
(18:06) — Galton and Hereditary Genius
(19:12) — Saleeby’s “Elevated Humanity”
(24:00) — William Inge’s “Ideal Humanity”
(27:00) — Nietzsche and the Superman
(29:44) — Eugenics as a Religion of Peace
(32:02) — The Organising Principle of Civilisation
(33:05) — Outro
